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Billy Conroy fights a lonely battle against cigarette butts

While shooting photos of butts in snowbanks, we came across Conroy cleaning them up outside a Danforth Ave. restaurant.

While taking photos of cigarette butts sprouting from melting snowbanks outside bars on Danforth Ave., we came across Billy Conroy sweeping up butts in front of the Flamingo Restaurant. Conroy says he cleans them up because they're sickening. (JACK LAKEY / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

If there’s an award for cleaning up messes made by other people, it should go to Billy Conroy.

Those who smoke outside bars often flick the butt into a snowbank, where it is buried under a new layer of snow until a thaw, when an entire winter’s worth of butts start popping out of the filthy snow.

We’ve seen snowbanks bristling with as many butts as quills on a porcupine — a despicable sign of spring — and wondered about the louts who deposited them.

Do they figure they’ll go away on their own, or have they not thought about it?

The same questions occur to Conroy, but he’s willing to do something about it, at least in his own neighbourhood.

With the mild weather lately, we’ve noticed the inexorable rise of butts in the snow, and went looking for a worst-case scenario outside bars along Danforth Ave.

None of the bars have done anything about the dreck until we got to the Flamingo “Cold Beer and Good Time” Restaurant, where a guy was sweeping up butts from the sidewalk and the melting snow.

Are you from the Flamingo, we asked.

Nope, he said.

Then why are you doing this?

Because I can’t stand it, said the guy, who introduced himself as Billy Conroy and said he lives in an apartment above the restaurant.

Conroy likes beer and a smoke and a good time as much as anyone, but said the sidewalk beneath his apartment window is his front yard, and that if he doesn’t clean it up, nobody will.

“It’s not like I want to, but it’s a horrible mess and I’d rather clean it up than keep walking past it,” he said.

It’s too bad they don’t put a can outside the door, so smokers can toss their butts into it, we said.

They did, but pedestrians also put trash in it, he said. When smokers tossed a butt into the can, it sometimes started a fire.

“Not many people used them anyway, so I just try to keep the mess cleaned up.”

Too bad more people don’t think like Conroy.

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